Language and languages, mostly but not always about English

19/03/2017

In my publicity for Great English Mistakes I list some typical mistakes made by Spanish-speakers. I have been asked for explanations of them.

• People is kind.Should be: People are kind.Explanation: In Spanish the word for “people” (gente) is singular.

• Which is your phone?Should be: What is your phone number? The Spanish would be: ¿Cuál es tu teléfono?Explanation: 1) “Cuál” conventionally translates as “which” so Spanish-speakers say “which” in questions with unlimited possibilities. 2) The Spanish form does not include the word for number.

• I am interesting to know you. Should be: I am interested to know you.Explanation: A common mistake with no obvious cause.

• How many children you have? Should be: How many children do you have / have you got?Explanation: Spanish ¿Cuántos hijos tienes? The verb (tienes) is not marked as a question. The meaning is shown by the context, with intonation in speech and punctuation in writing.

• I am sorry, I am constipated. Should be: I am sorry, I have a cold.Explanation: Spanish “constipado” refers to a blocked nose.

• I forgot my books at home. Should be: I left my books at home.Explanation: Spanish-language interference.

• I came walking. Should be: I came on foot. Explanation: Spanish-language interference.

• My car is in the parking. Should be: My car is in the car park.Explanation: “Parking” is the Spanish for car park.

• Is very beautiful your sister. Should be: Your sister is very beautiful.Explanation: Spanish often starts a sentence with a verb followed by the subject.

• My fathers live in Zaragoza.Should be: My parents live in Zaragoza.Explanation: In Spanish “padre” is “father” but “padres” is “parents”. This applies generally, e.g. “rey” is “king” but “los reyes de España” is “the King and Queen of Spain”.

27/11/2016

When is a word a word and when is it two words, or even three? A strange thing about English is its ability to assimilate different words into the same form.

bowThere are two words with the same spelling. One of these words has two pronunciations but its meanings all relate to the idea of bending.

pronounced /b@U/It is the thing used to shoot an arrow. It is a knot made with two loops, typically used to tie shoelaces or worn by girls in their hair or in a bow tie. The elbow is the joint where the arm bends in the middle.

pronounced /baU/ There are two different words with this pronunciation.

The ﬁrst is the verb related to the noun described above. It means to bend forward from the waist as a mark of respect. To bow your head is to let it fall forward as a sign of humility or shame. To be bowed down with care is to be oppressed by it. To take a bow is to recognise applause or congratulation, literally or metaphorically.

The other word is the rounded or pointed part at the front of a ship. Another form of this second word, bough (with the same pronunciation), is a poetical word for the branch of a tree. Most native speakers are not aware that these words have different origins.

case The word case represents two separate words that have no etymological connection.

A case is a container that is speciﬁcally designed to contain one particular item: cigarette case, glasses case, pen/pencil case. A suitcase is used for carrying clothes. A briefcase is a container used for carrying papers; the reference is to the use of the word brief to refer to the notes that a barrister uses.

Lower case and upper case letters are other names for small letters and capital letters respectively. Printers used to keep the small letters in the lower part of the case in which they kept their type and the capital letters in the upper part of it.

From a different origin, it means an example or occurrence of something: An interesting case. A case of meningitis and is used as a grammatical term

A case meaning a container, a suitcase for example, or upper- and lower-case letters, has a different origin from a case as an example, phenomenon, a case of malaria or the nominative case.

Then suffix -most, found in topmost, northernmost, and similar words, is not the same as the superlative adverb in most difficult.

punch This means to hit with a closed ﬁst; it can be used as a noun (throw a punch). It also means to make a hole in paper, metal, leather etc. and is the name of the tool used for doing so. You can punch a piece of metal or punch a hole in a piece of metal.

policy A policy /"pQlIsi/ is the course of action or strategy adopted by a government, company, other organisation, or an individual. A document stating the terms and conditions of an insurance contract is also called a policy.

These are different words. As a course of action it is related to polite and police. The word policy as used in insurance terms is from French, and probably ultimately from Greek apodeixis meaning evidence, proof.

pool A pool is a small body of water occurring naturally. Pools suitable for swimming in are called swimming pools, but now swimming pools are usually artiﬁcial.

A pool is also the result of people contributing money or other resources to a common fund. Businesses may pool their capital; friends on holiday together may pay money into a pool for food and other common expenses. The pools (usually plural) is a system of betting on football matches where the money paid is pooled and distributed to the winner or winners; this idea also lies behind the name of the game pool, which is similar to billiards and snooker.

Some companies and other large organisations have a car pool where cars are provided in common for employees, a group of friends or neighbours might organise a car pool to take each other’s children to school, and journalists in difﬁcult conditions might form a pool to exchange information that they have gathered.

Although these two words (pool of water and common resources) have different origins, they are associated in the minds of many people.

All of the above deﬁnitions derive ultimately meaning a gate. The person responsible for guarding the gate of a town or building derives from the Latin porta. However, a different origin (Latin portare) gives the word porter as someone who carries things, especially luggage at railway stations and airports.

Found (create, originate), founder (sink) and foundry (a place where metal is worked) are all different in origin.

This is based on articles in my A Guide to English Language Usage from Lavengro Books.

16/10/2016

You might think that an unpublished book was one that had never been presented to the public. And if so you’d be right, for the Concise Oxford English Dictionary defines the word as:

adj. (of a work) not published. > (of an author) having no writings published.

and the Oxford English Dictionary has:

1.a Not made generally known or accessible, esp. in print.

1.b Of an author: having had no writings published.

2 Not divulged or disclosed.

Neither dictionary offers any other meaning. However, Amazon (and possibly other publishers) have given it a new meaning: removal from sale of a book that has already been published. That is to say, first it is published and then it is unpublished.

It occurs to me that the prefix un- does have two meanings. This use in unpublished is the same as unplugged and untied, where something that has been done in undone and is different from unknown and unwritten, where something has not yet been done.

14/08/2016

The world of self-publishing has moved on a lot in the last few years. It is not all that long since self-publishing on Kindle was a nightmare; now it is easy. There is one snag, formatting. Most books published for Kindle have plain narrative text; they are novels or text-based non-fiction. Fair enough, that is what works with Kindle’s reflowable text.

In my particular case that is no good. There are two reasons: my books have complex formatting of numbers, bullet points, spacing, headers tables etc. and they include phonetic symbols in the Times New Roman Phonetics font, which does not display on a Kindle screen.

However, there is a solution. Kindle Textbook Creator is a piece of software that takes a pdf file and converts it into an image of the page suitable for Kindle viewing, adding digital rights management (DRM) as it does so. This preserves all the formatting and fonts of the original. The result can only be viewed on devices that display an image, i.e. not basic Kindles but Kindle Fire, other tablets, phones and Kindle for PC. This is something of a drawback, but perhaps not so great a one since people use such books for reference and clarity of presentation rather than for casual reading, and the displayed text has the usual facilities for searching, highlighting, annotating etc. It also claims to incorporate pop-up images and mp3 audio files, though I haven’t tested this. All in all, Kindle Textbook Creator is a good idea.

Or it would be if it worked properly. The problem is that it doesn’t.

My books contain a large number of hyperlinks for cross references. A pdf file can easily be made that preserves these links functionally within the document. Unfortunately, Amazon have proved incapable of preserving these functional links when they add the digital rights management (DRM) protection to the pdf file before publishing it. Worse than that, the problem has existed since I first uploaded a book in February. During that time I have experienced the frustration of dealing with the Kindle Direct Publishing Help service, which does not send an immediate acknowledgement of messages posted via the web site, takes several days to send a boilerplate response to a specific request, does not allocate a reference or case number to each input and, once you fight your way through the boilerplate, signs each response with a different name so you never know who you are dealing with.

When I had this problem a second time and went back to their Help service, referring to my original complaint, I received the same boilerplate as before. That made me angry. I had no intention of going back to square one.

Finally, after some persistence, I received a clear assurance that they had at last solved this glitch and that the links would work on all image devices for Kindle. I published my book and downloaded it yesterday. Unlike most publishers, including Amazon’s print-on-demand arm CreateSpace, Kindle Direct Publishing offers no possibility for authors and/or publishers to obtain free copies of their own works. I found that the problem was exactly the same as before: the functionality of the hyperlinks in the pdf file that I uploaded had been removed by Amazon in the process of adding DRM and publication. As this is in flat contradiction of what I was told would be the case, and in view of everything that I have experienced in the last six months, I find it impossible to believe that Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing division is dealing with me in good faith.

I have new editions of two books ready to go, Great English Mistakes and Pearls of the English Language. My plan was to announce both print and Kindle editions of these two books at the same time, available from the same page on all Amazon sites, for the beginning of the academic year in September. As things stand, this seems impossible.

I will be on holiday for the rest of August. I hope that Amazon manage to solve this snafu before I return. If not, they will hear from my lawyer, claiming compensation for the loss and damage that my business has suffered as a result of their incompetence and untruthfulness, including delay to the publication of the print version if the two versions cannot be published simultaneously.

I should make it clear that my dissatisfaction is limited to Kindle Direct Publishing. I have no complaints at all to make about CreateSpace, Amazon’s print-on-demand arm, or Amazon in general as a supplier.

At one time I sold my books through Amazon and found it far from satisfactory. In those days amazon.es did not exist and I was limited to amazon.co.uk, others being unavailable since I did not have a bank account in France, Germany etc. This mean that I had to pay the extortionate postage rate demanded even between EU countries to send books from Spain the UK, which in turn led to a ridiculous UK price for the books.

Some time later I signed a contract with a Spanish company for them to take over Amazon sales. This actually worked out better for me than doing it myself, even with a lower price.

Now I find that Amazon has set up its own print-on-demand system called CreateSpace. I am using it to publish new editions of my three books, A Guide to English Language Usage, Pearls of the English Language and Great English Mistakes.

The system that they offer is flexible and even allows the printing and delivery of single copies of books to all of Europe at the same, reasonable price as well as to other parts of the world.

Like many things, it seems complex at first sight but it is manageable and has a good help service and support community. They offer templates for interior text in the various trim sizes that can be used. Covers can be provided by the author or selected from, their own range. Being American, they do all this in inches although metric measurements are also stated in most cases. They do, however, recognise the decimal system so I was bemused to work out that 0.0625" was the 1/16" that I remembered from my childhood!

There is no registration or upload fee so the only essential upfront cost is the ISBN. CreateSpace will provide one for free, but in that case CreateSpace is listed as the publisher. I have seen this on Amazon for some publishers that have simply copied public domain books that are out of copyright, but as I obviously want to keep my own Lavengro Books imprint I bought a Spanish ISBN. Authors/publishers can obtain copies of their own books for the cost of printing and shipping; these can be delivered anywhere, making it possible to offer any number of free copies for publicity and also to supply bookshops.

Sales and royalties can be tracked easily and payment is made directly into a bank account in any country. The registration procedure requires a declaration of whether or not you are a ‘US person’ for tax purposes.

Pearls of the English Language and Great English Mistakes are scheduled for publication soon, in September if possible, with companion Kindle versions. I had hoped to have them on the market by now but there has been a glitch with Kindle Direct Publishing, about whom I am unable to report positively.

01/03/2016

At last I am publishing my books in Kindle format, starting with Pearls of the English Language. It is available worldwide in the Kindle Store.

I am able to do this easily through Kindle Direct Publishing. Because of the phonetic symbols, which do not display in Kindle’s converted ‘reflowable text’, I have used Kindle Textbook Creator. This is an application that takes a pdf file and converts it to a format that is an image of the original. In this way, any image, chart, graph etc. can be preserved in the display on the Kindle. This display is only available on tablet devices like Kindle Fire, iPad, Kindle for PC etc. It is not available on Kindle e-ink devices and the book cannot be downloaded to them.

It is a useful idea and one that has solved a big problem: the impossibility of making my books available on Kindle because the phonetic symbols could not be displayed.

Amazon describes this as a ‘print replica’ but it is not a simple replica of the pages of the printed book. It is a completely new presentation which has been carefully designed and laid out to make it easy and pleasant to read.

1. 'I could care less' 2. Apostrophe used for plurals 3. Hyperbolic use of 'literally' 4. Confusion of 'loose' and 'lose' 5. Confusion of 'your' and 'you're' 6. Confusion of 'their', 'there' and 'they're' 7. Misunderstanding of 'nonplus' 8. Confusion of 'affect' and 'effect' 9. Confusion of it's' and 'its' 10. Claim that 'irregardless' is not a word

There is one other that is worth mentioning: the use of a superlative adjective for two items is often held to be a solecism. Nevertheless, Jane Austen wrote in Emma:

Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.

She was the youngest of the two daughters of a most affectionate, indulgent father, and had, in consequence of her sister's marriage, been mistress of his house from a very early period. Her mother had died too long ago for her to have more than an indistinct remembrance of her caresses, and her place had been supplied by an excellent woman as governess, who had fallen little short of a mother in affection.

Less common surely is the reverse, the use of the comparative with more than two items. Nevertheless , in the Sherlock Holmes story of The Five Orange Pips Watson recalls some cases that are not described in full.

The year '87 furnished us with a long series of cases of greater or less interest, of which I retain the records. Among my headings under this one twelve months I find an account of the adventure of the Paradol Chamber, of the Amateur Mendicant Society, who held a luxurious club in the lower vault of a furniture warehouse, of the facts connected with the loss of the British bark Sophy Anderson, of the singular adventures of the Grice Patersons in the island of Uffa*, and finally of the Camberwell poisoning case. In the latter, as may be remembered, Sherlock Holmes was able, by winding up the dead man's watch, to prove that it had been wound up two hours before, and that therefore the deceased had gone to bed within that time -- a deduction which was of the greatest importance in clearing up the case

Watson, or rather Doyle of course, uses latter to describe the last of five items.

*The Adventures of the Grice Patersons in the Island of Uffa by Sandor Jay Sonnen is available in Kindle format from Amazon.

I consider myself Marxist. Let us say that after the budgets theorists and communication of we can there is a reading very specific gramsci.

My translation would be:

I consider myself to be a Marxist. Let us say that behind the theoretical and communication premises of Podemos there is a very specific reading of Gramsci.

1) Tras often means after, following, in the wake of but here it means behind.

2) Presupuesto is the noun from presuponer, which is English presuppose. It means a budget or an estimate for work to be done, but here it is used with its literal meaning of a presupposition, assumption or premise.

3) Teórico means theoretical and is the adjective that qualifies presupuesto. For some reason the translator has taken it in its meaning as a noun, theoreticians.

4) Podemos is the name of a political party. It is the Spanish for We Can and is modelled on Obama’s slogan Yes We Can. The translator has failed to recognise it as a proper noun despite the capital letter.

5) The translator has failed to put the adjectives before the noun although the difference in usual adjective position is a fundamental distinction between Romance and Germanic languages,

6) It is unclear why the de has been omitted.

7) Gramsci is a proper noun and is always capitalised. I cannot understand why the capital letter has been changed. After all, Marxist has been capitalised although it rightly has a lower-case m in Spanish.

05/05/2015

Returning after a regrettably long absence I would like to mention something that I saw on Trip Adviser. A hotel in Spain was replying to a customer who had complained that the hotel didn’t have irons for hire. The response was that this was the hotel’s policy ‘for security reasons’.

Clearly they mean safety, not security; there is an obvious fire risk in hotel guests using irons in their rooms. The root of the problem is that Spanish seguridad covers two concepts that are clearly differentiated in English.

As I say in A Guide to English Language Usage:

Both of these are to do with protection from danger.

Safety is protection from natural risks: The flooded river threatened the village’s safety; or unintentional man‑made dangers: safety at work; the safety of drugs. Note the endings of the abstract nouns: safety but unsafeness.

Security is protection against deliberate human activity: The company’s security department is investigating the theft; A security guard is on duty at the factory all night.

Safety regulations ensure that an aeroplane can fly with the minimum risk of mechanical or human failure. Security staff ensure that terrorists do not board the plane. Safety at work refers to physical safety in the workplace; job security is the certainty that you will not lose your job.

A security is a name for a financial instrument such as a share certificate. Security for a loan is the valuable object that is offered as a guarantee of repayment.

And more succinctly in Great English Mistakes:

The Spanish word seguridad corresponds to two different but connected ideas in English. Safety tells us whether a thing is physically safe. Security is related to prevention of risk from human activity. So in an airport the safety check makes sure that the wings will not fall off the plane and the security check makes sure that no bombs are on board the plane. Sometimes seguridad has to be translated as safety and security in English.

14/01/2015

It is no secret that I dislike apostrophes and would abolish them if I had the power to do so. Hyphens, on the other hand, are a different matter. They have a useful purpose in indicating compound words. A Spanish-English dictionary is one that describes the two languages while a Spanish English teacher is a person of Spanish nationality who teaches the English language.

Hyphens seem to be disappearing. I regret this. However, they are commonly used to combine numbers and units: a 20-tonne lorry, a 40-year-old woman. Somehow something went wrong in the Guardian and we have this splendid correction:

An unwanted hyphen, introduced during the editing process, had us claiming in our print edition that the Villa Valmarana ai Nani in Vicenza, Italy, was “named for the 17-stone ‘nani’, or dwarfs, that surround the home” To clarify: there are 17 dwarf statues surrounding the villa, they are made of stone, and we’re not sure how much they weigh.

People outside the UK may not understand the point. In the system of imperial (sic) weights and measures, which is still commonly used there, a stone is equivalent to 14 pounds. That is pounds weight, not the country’s currency of pounds sterling. Seventeen stone is about 108 kg – rather a lot for a dwarf! The imperial system of weights as used in the UK (it is different in the USA) is:

An imperial ton is thus 2,240 lb (believe me, I learnt it all by heart at school along with rods, poles and perches for measuring land, and a mile is 1,760 yards, 5,280 feet or 63,360 inches). Coincidentally but conveniently, the metric tonne of 1,000 kg is equivalent to 2,205 lb. The two words ton and tonne are distinguished in spelling but are both pronounced /tVn/.

This is the avoirdupois system. Precious metals are weighed in the Troy system, where a pound is 12 pounces or 5,760 grains.

There is no likelihood of the UK adopting the metric system in any foreseeable future.

The plural of dwarf The standard plural is dwarfs. J. R. R. Tolkien used dwarves in his books. According to Wikipedia:

The original editor of The Hobbit “corrected” Tolkien’s plural dwarves to dwarfs, as did the editor of the Puffin paperback edition of The Hobbit. According to Tolkien, the “real ‘historical’” plural of dwarf is dwarrows or dwerrows. He referred to dwarves as “a piece of private bad grammar”. In Appendix F of The Lord of the Rings it is explained that if we still spoke of dwarves regularly, English might have retained a special plural for the word dwarf as with goose—geese. Despite Tolkien’s fondness for it, the form dwarrow only appears in his writing as Dwarrowdelf, a name for Moria.

Tolkien used Dwarves, instead, which corresponds with Elf and Elves. In this matter, one has to consider the fact that the etymological development of the term dwarf differs from the similar-sounding word scarf (plural scarves). The English word is related to old Norse dvergr, which, in the other case, would have had the form dvorgr. But this word was never recorded, and the f/g-emendation (English/Norse) dates further back in language history.

Punctuation Connoisseurs of this arcane subject will appreciate the alternating double and single quotation marks in nested quotations in both the above pieces from the Guardian and Wikipedia.

24/12/2014

The other day I went to a carol concert here in Barcelona. It finished with White Christmas – or it should have, but this is what we got:

I'm dreaming of a why Christmas With every Christmas card I wry May your days be merry and brigh And may all your Christmases be why.

It’s the final-consonant problem of course. Native English choirs pride themselves on all hitting the sound at the same instant. However, Catalan does have words that end with t, unlike Spanish, which has no words ending with the airway obstructed or the mouth closed.

Or so I thought till I went to YouTube and found that Bing Crosby misses the t’s too.

So what? Happy Christmas to those who celebrate it, and enjoy yourselves anyway to those who don’t.

I have been otherwise occupied in the last few months. I hope to resume normal service in the New Year.

02/12/2014

Outstanding is an ambiguous word. Something that stands out is different from the rest. An outstanding result is an extraordinary one, and the word is specifically positive; on its own it implies excellence. But something that is a matter that still has to be dealt with or a debt that has not been paid is also said to be outstanding.

A similar word is overlook. A hotel room can overlook the sea or you can overlook (i.e. ignore) a mistake that someone has made. The basic meaning is the same but in one case by looking out the sea you can see it from above while on the other by figuratively looking over a mistake at something else you do not see what is below you.

18/11/2014

Willie Ramirez was taken by ambulance to a South Florida hospital in a comatose state. He became quadriplegic as a result of a misdiagnosed intracerebellar hemorrhage that continued to bleed for more than two days as he lay unconscious in the hospital. In the course of the law suit, it was asserted that Willie could have walked out of the hospital had the neurosurgeon been called in earlier. No neuro consult was ordered for two days because the Emergency Room physician and the doctor covering Willie in the ICU erroneously believed that Willie had suffered an intentional drug overdose and had treated him accordingly. The misdiagnosis was based on the physical exam which initially pointed to a drug overdose, and on complete confusion regarding the medical history. At the heart of this confusion, was the Spanish word “intoxicado” which is NOT equivalent to the English word “intoxicated.”

Among Cubans, “intoxicado” is kind of an all encompassing word that means there’s something wrong with you because of something you ate or drank. I ate something and now I have hives or an allergic reaction to the food or I’m nauseous. On the day Willie’s intracerebellar bleed began, he had lunch at a fast food restaurant, the newly opened Wendy’s. His mother and his girlfriend’s mother assumed that the severe headache he experienced that night was related to eating a bad hamburger at Wendy’s – that Willie was “intoxicado.”

In Spain, intoxicación is used to mean food poisoning, and I warn students about this, mentioning the occasional (and increasingly rare) cases of people being found to be ‘intoxicated’ in old people’s homes.

Note: in English intoxicated can mean poisoned in medical usage but is usually understood to mean drunk. It’s one of those not-quite false friends where the meanings overlap bot don’t coincide.

17/11/2014

FirstableA classic mistake is to write this because you have heard a speaker say it at a meeting. But you haven’t. What he actually said was, First of all, I would like to thank …

I can’t remember when I first saw it in written work from a student – and I remember being astonished when I did – but it wasn’t by any means new to me when I wrote that.

Now the Language Log reports that it is appearing on the internet from native speakers with quotations going back to 1996. It is perfectly understandable from a non-native but surely there is something wrong when native speakers use it.

28/10/2014

A cup sits on a saucer. That is so obvious that the phrase cup and saucer trips naturally off the tongue without a second thought. So how can Spanish have no word for saucer?

The things exist of course but are called platillos, little plates. They have the dimple in the centre to hold a cup, and are used for serving coffee, but they are also used for serving tapas or for returning change in bars. They are usually white, though some coffee brands have their distinctive cups

This may be due to the habit of drinking coffee in very small cups unlike the British habit of dinking tea in larger cups, which lend themselves more easily to decoration.

A cup-supporting platillo is so unremarkable a thing that Spanish Wikipedia's entry for platillos is about cymbals.

In Spanish a flying saucer is sometimes a platillo volante (taken from English I am sure) but more usually an OVNI (objeto volante no identificado –unidentified flying object).

Florecer is the equivalent of the English flourish but for the metaphorical examples we have alcanzar, transformarse and convertirse, which are respectively reach, be transformed and be converted although the last two verbs correspond to become, of which I will have more to say on a future occasion.

19/10/2014

I have long known the Spanish expression un brindis al sol as meaning an impressive but empty gesture. The Spanish literally means a toast to the sun, which surely must be a fine example of an impressive gesture that achieves nothing.

It was only the other day that I read a Spanish author who used the expression and mentioned that it originates in bullfighting and has no direct connection with the sun as such. A bullring is traditionally divided into two sections, sol and sombra, which are sun and shade respectively. The sol seats are cheaper and were typically occupied by poorer people who might be enthusiastic but were not as knowledgeable as the aficionados who chose the seats in the shade. A bullfighter who wanted to make an impression might make a gesture to the crowd in the cheap seats by dedicating a particular bull to them. In this case the word would be brindar, which is also to drink a toast. This is the same as playing to the gallery in an English idiom that has the same origin, making a gesture to win easy sympathy and support.

14/10/2014

[Classical Latin] was the only language in which it was possible to hold an intellectual discussion, as the vernacular languages of the time lacked adequate vocabulary.Alessandro Barbero, Charlemagne

Language teachers and translators know that there are words that present a real problem when an equivalent has to be found in another language. This is not (usually) because the concept does not exist but because what is perceived as one idea in one language is divided into many smaller concepts in another or is expressed by a circumlocution. The main exception of course is to be found in cultural or natural phenomena that exist in one language area but not in the other. In these cases the word is usually taken over directly: tundra, vodka, matador, canyon and veldt would be examples of this in English.

I know that Geoff Pullum says: Whenever you hear someone starting to say something that begins with "The X have no word for Y", or "The X have N different words for Y", never listen to them, and always check your wallet to make sure it's still there.

He is right to the extent that he is talking in terms of theoretical linguistics. In this series of posts I am looking at the practical difficulties faced by teachers and translators who are constantly having to find equivalent expressions in different languages in order to facilitate learning or understanding.

13/10/2014

This is the first in a series of …has no word for… which will be posted at 06.00 Central European Time on Tuesdays. for an explanation of the title, click here

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Shallow is a strange word. It is the opposite of deep, having no meaning in itself and only being defined negatively. The OED defines it as:

Not deep, having little extension in a downward direction: said e.g. of water, of a dish or tray, of a depression or excavation in the ground.

Shallowness cannot be measured; it can only be understood as the opposite of depth. A swimming-pool has a shallow end and a deep end but both have depth: the shallow end may be 50cm deep.

It is not surprising, therefore, that Spanish, like other Romance languages, has no word for shallow (though German has seicht). The usual translation in Spanish would be poco profundo. Although poco means little, in fact in such constructions it is effectively a negation so the Spanish for shallow is not deep..

That is when it comes to measuring vertical depth, a swimming-pool, a river, a well, a grave etc. But a shallow dish could be a plato llano (flat plate), which could also be a dinner plate.

In English we take a deep breath of breathe deeply; shallow breathing is a sign of some problem. In Spanish this is respiración superficial and the same word could refer to a shallow person. That could also be superficial in English but a shallow conversation might be frívolo or banal.

A slope can be shallow. This is the opposite of steep. In Spanish it is poca or baja pendiente (little or low slope). Here poca is not a negative and does mean little.

12/10/2014

Among my English-language students I have some who are studying with Diplotaxis to enter the Spanish diplomatic service. It is clear that such people have a very real need to know What Diplomats Do, and that the only way to achieve this is to rely on the experience of professionals for information and advice. Sir Brian Barder’s book draws on his own time in the British diplomatic service, in which he served as ambassador in several important countries, to provide a wealth of practical information that is hard to find elsewhere.

The book follows the career of a fictional British diplomat called Adam and his wife, inevitably called Eve. The British background is only natural but the work and life of diplomats has much in common no matter the country that they represent: dealing with foreign governments, dealing with your own foreign ministry, humanitarian work, consular activities, promoting trade, working in international organisations, it is all here in a readable presentation – and not only professional life but also vivid and informative descriptions of the personal and family problems and pleasures of living and working in an unusual situation far from home.

Not only do we follow Adam’s own career from entry to the highest levels of diplomacy. There are personal illustrations from Brian Barder’s own time spent in many parts of the world, including his personal decision to authorise the airlift that relieved the Ethiopian famine in the 1980s. Spanish readers will be especially interested in his account of his participation in the UN debate over Gibraltar in the 1960s.

By combining a realistic description of Adam’s career with the factual events of his own, Brian Barder presents the ups and downs, the pleasure and the pain, of a diplomatic career. I recommend it strongly to my students and to anyone else who wants to know what diplomats actually do.

The author Sir Brian Barder, KCMG, had a varied career in the British Diplomatic Service, serving in Moscow, Canberra and New York, as ambassador to Ethiopia, the Republic of Bénin, and Poland, and as high commissioner to Nigeria and Australia.

Availability The book is available in paper and Kindle versions from all Amazon sites including amazon.co.uk, amazon.es and amazon.com. For more information about the book and other options for buying it, click here.

PublishingWhat Diplomats Do is written by Sir Brian Barder KCMG and published by Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN-13: 978-1442226357

NoteThis is an unpaid review of a book that I bought at my own expense. I have no connection, personal, commercial or financial, with the publisher of What Diplomats Do or with any bookseller. Peter Harvey.

09/10/2014

I'am Barcelonian

And also a city where the Council can’t be bothered to get its English-language material aimed at expats corrected by a proper translator or proofreader.

The event, that will take place at the Museu Marítim de Barcelona, will provide all the information and services the city offers you for landing, doing business and having fun.

For those who may not know, Barcelonian is a totally invented word. It is a word I have never heard or seen in over 30 years’ residence in this city. If this had come to me, I would have certainly recommended I’m from Barcelona.

02/10/2014

Remarks by President Obama and President Rajoy of Spain After Bilateral Meeting

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Let me say it’s a great pleasure to welcome my friend, Prime Minister Rajoy, to the Oval Office … I should note that the World Cup is coming up. Spain is the defending titleholder, but the United States is rapidly improving -- (laughter) -- and so perhaps if the Prime Minister has some advice for us in terms of how we can win a title at some point, it would be most welcoming.

But thank you so much for the visit.

PRESIDENT RAJOY: (As interpreted.) Good afternoon. I will be giving you that advice so that you can come in second at the World Cup, and I’m sure you will understand why. (Laughter.)

Obama’s speech is correct and the titling is wrong; Rajoy is the Spanish prime minister. So where has this confusion come from?

The head of the Spanish government has the title in Spanish of presidente del gobierno, which can be translated as president of the government. He presides over meetings of the government, and the Spanish gobierno corresponds to the British cabinet (the British government includes a number of junior ministers who are not in the cabinet). It is the committee of about 20 ministers who have the highest executive authority in the country and are members of, and are responsible to, the country’s parliament as is usual in the European system. His constitutional position corresponds exactly to that of David Cameron as the British prime minister or that of Angela Merkel in Germany, where this position is called Kanzler (chancellor).

The problem arises from the Spanish word presidente, which does of course mean president in English in the sense of a head of state of a republic, both as an executive president like US Barack Obama and as a figurehead president like President Joachim Gauck of Germany. However, it also corresponds to the English chairman. The presidente of a chess club or of a residents’ association would be called in English the chairman, or increasingly the chair, of that organisation. So, far from, being the Spanish president Mariano Rajoy is, I would say as a literal translation, the chairman of the Spanish cabinet, although the website of his own office calls him the President of the Government of Spain. Certain confusion is understandable but the White House should be able to get it right. Rajoy is clearly not the president of the country; Spain does after all have a king as head of state.

In Catalonia, however, there is a more complex situation. Artur Mas is in Catalan the President de la Generalitat. In fact, his position is similar to that of any prime minister. He is a member of the Catalan parliament and is responsible to it, and he chairs meetings of the Catalan govern, which like the Spanish gobierno is the committee of ministers, i.e. the cabinet. The linguistic problem arises because the Generalitat is more than just the cabinet or government; the name refers to all the public authority under the Catalan government, what would be called the state apparatus in a sovereign state. Normally, that doesn’t matter (government is often used in Britain to describe what is really the state) but in translating Mas’s title there is a problem: although his constitutional position is equivalent to any prime minister, his title refers to the Generalitat, which is more than just the cabinet or government. The Catalan government refers to him in English as the President of the Generalitat. Nevertheless, his constitutional position is clearly that of prime minister and, as it seems paradoxical to have a president in the English sense of a word as the head of a level of government that is subordinate to the state, it would seem reasonable for a translator to use prime minister to describe the head of the Catalan government in English, or perhaps first minister, which is the title of the head of the Scottish government, or premier, which is used for the heads of the governments in the states of Canada and Australia. I must say, however, that most English-language media follow the Catalan government’s style.

The president of the Spanish region of Catalonia (BBC) Catalonia's president, Artur Mas; The Catalan president (BBC) THE president of Spain’s powerful northeastern region of Catalonia (The Scotsman) The president of the north-eastern Spanish region of Catalonia Artur Mas (Reuters) Catalonia's president Artur Mas (picture caption); Catalan President, Artur Mas; Spain's prime minister (The Guardian) regional President Artur Mas; Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy (Bloomberg)

However, there is

The First Minister of Catalonia, Artur Mas (The Spain Report) Artur Mas, president of Catalonia's regional government (Wall Street Journal). This is in a picture caption. The body text has: The leader of the Catalonia region and Catalan leader Artur Mas.